Apple predicted to sell 10 million iPhones during the holiday quarter

Analysts expect holiday iPhone sales to blow through the roof with an estimated 10 million units, based on reports that Apple’s component suppliers are seeing a 30 percent boost in orders.

Component suppliers have seen their third quarter integrated circuitry shipments increase 30.9 percent over the previous quarter, Taiwan-based semiconductor daily Digitimes reported this past Friday, citing Taipei-based Market Intelligence & Consulting Institute. Quarterly shipments have created $613.7 million in market value, a 32.0 percent sequential increase. Much of this growth has been attributed to Apple’s iPhone that remains in high demand, leading Digitimes to estimate a record number of iPhone shipmens in the December quarter:

In the third quarter of 2009, sales of the Apple iPhone 3GS far exceeded expectations, and sales are expected to reach 10 million in the fourth quarter of 2009. iPhone chip suppliers have benefited from this development. Furthermore, other terminal vendors made advance procurements to prepare for the peak season in the fourth quarter.

If this estimate proves correct, Apple will sell more iPhones this holiday quarter than it has sold in any other quarter since the original model arrived in June 2007. Last quarter, AT&T activated 3.2 million iPhones in the US, representing 43 percent of the 7.4 million iPhone units that Apple moved globally. Digitimes estimated that key beneficiaries of the strong holiday demand for the iPhone will be Samsung, which makes the iPhone’s processor, Infineon that provides Apple with baseband and radio frequency transceivers, and power amplifiers vendor TriQuint.

Digitimes’ sales projection is shared across the analyst community. AppleInsider cited a Needham & Co. analyst Charlie Wolf who called the iPhone in a new edition of his “Wolf Bytes” Monday “the gold standard” of the smartphone market, arguing that:

No competitive smartphone has emerged as an iPhone killer just as no portable music player came close to becoming an iPod killer,” he said. “That’s because no one develops user-friendly software like Apple does.

Wolf nodded at a recent IDC smartphone market share survey, included here, that puts Apple’s share of the smartphone market in the US and Western Europe at 29.2 percent and 23.5 percent, respectively.

Apple’s share of the Far East smartphone market, however, hovers in a single-digit region due to a tremendous price pressure from vendors of cheap phones, the lack of WiFi, and Chinese grey market that has stalled iPhone sales to a halt. China Unicom, the nation’s second-largest carrier and anon-exclusive iPhone distributor, has announced last week that it sold 100,000 iPhones since it launched the device to its 144 million subscribers on October 30. The carrier sold just 5,000 iPhones during the launch weekend – a huge disappointment for a one billion people market.

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BT

The Blackberry is going the way of the Motorola Razr which I owned. I switched from the Razr to the Blackberry which was a game-changer in its day. I now own an iPhone another game-changer. The difference is that I can’t see how I could ever switch from the iPhone because of the applications like NeuroMobile and Dictionary.com that I rely on. The applications advantage makes the underlying handset technology less relevant. Apple now just has to keep pace with the handset technology and keep churning out great applications.